Princess Margriet of the Netherlands to appear in Goderich Sunday

Royalty is coming to Goderich on Sunday.

Princess Margriet of the Netherlands and her husband Professor Pieter van Vollenhoven are scheduled to arrive in town Sunday afternoon to celebrate the friendship between Canada and the Netherlands and to unveil a plaque in Liberation Memorial Park, officials with the Dutch-Canadians Remember As One committee said in a media release.

The plaque will honour the Canadian sacrifice made in the Liberation of the Netherlands campaign in 1944 and 1945 during the Second World War. More than 7,600 Canadians, 20 of them from Huron County, lost their lives in the campaign alongside other Allied forces to liberate the Netherlands from German occupation.

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Princess Margriet and her husband will arrive at the park, which was developed in 1970 to mark the 25th anniversary of the liberation, at 2:30 p.m. The couple will then review a parade and unveil the plaque.

Afterward, the Princess and her husband are scheduled to take in a concert performed by the Royal Regiment of Canada and the pipers of the 48th Highlanders at Trinity Christian Reformed Church at 3:30 p.m. They are also slated to meet at a reception with veterans and family members of the “Huron County 20.”

Around 500,000 Dutch Canadians reside in Ontario. In 2011, the month of May was proclaimed Dutch Heritage Month in the province. In addition to the arrival coinciding with Dutch Heritage Month, Princess Margriet’s visit also comes as Canada gets set to celebrate its sesquicentennial this summer.

“After the Second World War Canada became a popular destination for Dutch immigrants and many settled in Ontario,” the committee says. “Nowadays, Canada counts more than one million Canadians of Dutch descent and almost every Dutch family has relatives in Canada.”

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According to the committee, members have been meeting for the past two years to try and create new ways to connect local youth to local history. The committee says they hope to maintain the connection created on Sunday with a new website that will utilize modern technology to bring to the present the firsthand accounts of veterans, their families, and post-war Dutch immigrants to Canada.

“Canadians are not very good at telling their own stories,” said Patrick Nagle, the committee’s media manager, in a statement. “Our service people came home wanting to get on with their lives rather than relive the past war experiences. Unfortunately, that leaves much of our nation’s story untold. We will capture this story with firsthand accounts while we still can.”

Princess Margriet was born at Ottawa Civic Hospital in 1943 to Princess Juliana, later Queen Juliana. The ward was declared a temporary international territory by the Canadian government so the princess would inherit her Dutch citizenship from her mother. Organizers said she has “has become an enduring symbol our nations’ special relationship.”

Every year since the end of the Second World War, the Netherlands have sent thousands of tulips to Canada in appreciation of the actions taken during the war. The tulip donations culminated in the creation of the Canadian Tulip Festival in Ottawa in the early 1950s. Every May 5, Dutch citizens celebrate Liberation Day, a national holiday marking the end of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

More information about the Princesses visit on Sunday can be found here.

— With files from Matthew Trevithick, Emanuela Campanella, and Elton Hobson.